The Political Economy of Fiscal Reforms in Latin America: Mexico Eric Magar (ITAM), Vidal Romero (ITAM), and Jeffrey Timmons (ITAM)
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The Political Economy of Fiscal Reforms in Latin America: Mexico Eric Magar (ITAM), Vidal Romero (ITAM), and Jeffrey Timmons (ITAM) Fiscal reform... was necessary under President Zedillo, urgent under President Fox and can be postponed no longer under President Calderón. – OECD Secretary General Angel Gurría (2006) INTRODUCTION This paper describes the main features of the Mexican fiscal system, details the most important changes that have occurred/not occurred over the past two decades, and explains what factors influenced the rate, degree and direction of change. In brief, we contend that there have been profound and ideologically consistent changes in spending assignment and in the institutional arrangements governing taxes, spending and debt management. Over the past 20 years, Mexico has moved from a highly centralized fiscal system characterized by extensive presidential discretion to a moderately decentralized system with more meaningful checks and balances. Decentralization of spending assignments has been coupled with steps designed to increase transparency, efficiency and accountability over public funds. Changes to the revenue collection system, by contrast, have been much smaller in magnitude and not as consistent in ideational terms; while the general trend has been to increase tax revenue in an equitable manner, not all changes in tax law have increased revenue or equity. Two factors—crisis and democratization/electoral competition, notably the emergence of multi-party government in 1997—particularly help explain the patterns of change and stasis in Mexican fiscal policies and institutions. The former has compelled presidents to push for policies that guarantee fiscal solvency, while the latter has altered the incentives of political actors and raised the transaction costs of negotiating exchange, thereby changing the nature of inter-branch negotiations: With democracy, Congress has increasing asked for—and gotten— ever increasing amounts of decentralization on spending; in return presidents have sought to— and sometimes realized—control over how these resources will be spent. 1 This paper proceeds as follows. Section 1 provides an overview of the status quo in terms of fiscal policies and outcomes. Section 2 presents an inventory of reforms, including ones that failed. Section 3 offers an analytical summary. Section 4 presents three case studies—the 1995 successful increase to the VAT under Zedillo, Fox’s failed 2001 fiscal reform, and Calderon’s (partially) successful reform in 2007. Part 5 concludes. 1. STATUS QUO This section describes the status quo for Mexico's fiscal policy in place at the start of the 1990s and traces its evolution through 2008. The focus is on government revenue, government expenditure, budget balance, and decentralization.1 1a. The Fiscal Balance (deficit and debt) Figure 1 puts the revenue and spending series together, reporting the budget balance of the central government in the period. It distinguishes what Hacienda calls balance primario from balance público. The former excludes interests to service the existing government debt, which the latter includes. The Mexican government has had primary surpluses in all years since 1990, averaging around 3 percent of GDP. The primary surplus reached about 7 percent during the peak period of privatization and fell to around 1 percent of GDP following the 1994-95 peso crisis and bank bailout. The ability of the government to contain that crisis and maintain a primary surplus regardless of external circumstances has allowed Mexico to reduce government interest payments from nearly 9 percent of GDP in 1990 (the debt was inherited from the 1980s) to about 2.5 percent of GDP since 2000. As a result, the overall public sector deficit has averaged about 1 percent of GDP in most years. 1 One complication with studying economic (and other) statistical data in Mexico is reliability. It is not uncommon that the same datum from two official sources has important differences. This problem led us to compute as many indicators as possible from the same primary source, aggregating the different budgetary categories to produce the figures that secondary official sources report in pre-computed (but invariably discrepant) fashion. The primary source we rely upon is “Estadísticas Oportunas de Finanzas Públicas y Deuda Pública,” produced and distributed by Hacienda. The file reports monthly aggregates from January 1990 to date for all public budgeting categories in terms of income and spending by the federal government. With some exceptions, notably taxes, our data is generally consistent with information from academic and government sources. 2 Figure 1 Budget balance as % of GDP 8% 6% 4% Primary balance 2% Public balance 0% -2% -4% 0 2 4 6 8 0 2 4 6 9 9 9 9 9 0 0 0 0 9 9 9 9 9 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 Source: prepared by authors with information from Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público “Estadísticas Oportunas de Finanzas Públicas y Deuda Pública” series Balance primario XAA30 and Balance público XAA (available at www.shcp.gob.mx). GDP in current prices data from www.inegi.gob.mx. Balanced budgets are Just one element of the debt/deficit story. In addition, Mexico has maintained a relatively manageable debt to GDP ratio, which started the series (see Figure 2) at nearly 40 percent of GDP in 1990 but had dropped by nearly half by 1993, after many money- losing state-owned-enterprises were privatized. Public sector debt spiked with the 1994-95 peso crisis, but has remained steady at roughly 20 percent of GDP for a decade. (The increase from 17.6 percent of GDP in 2000 to 22.6 percent in 2008 reflects debt incurred in the reform of the public sector pension system, which added 2.1 percent of GDP to the overall burden). Moreover, Mexico has switched a large of fraction of dollar dominated debt into pesos, making it less vulnerable to downward swings in the exchange rate: at the end of 2008, peso denominated debt stood at 80.3 percent of the total, compared to 55.3 in 2000. Likewise, it extended the average maturity of its debt from approximately 6 months in 1995 to approximately 3 years by 2004 (Cadena and Trillo 2006). It also created a Petroleum Stabilization fund in 2000, which contained some 145 billion pesos at the end of 2008, thanks to 3 an 2006. effective since savings source of revenue above the reference price) was diluted, if not ignored, during the first years of operation. It has only been 2 Hacienda's terminology), roughly 6-8 percent of GDP—double its contribution before the 1970s petroleum accounted for 25-35 percent of budgetary revenue parastatal( agencies, non-tax income, and tax income (Figure 3). Between 1990 and 2007, Section Revenue 1b. gobierno XET50, federal BalanceXAA30 primario and XAA público Source: see Table 1’s footnote, series Deuda interna neta, saldos, gobierno federal XEA00, Deuda neta, saldos, permitted extraordinary under circumstances. until 2007, when the obtain a balanced budget was an informal constraint driven by preferences of Hacienda officials off, as seen in the drop in interest paid yearly in the right side of Figure 2. Fiscal discipline to altered the rules concerning debt management and finance. Debt management efforts have paid contributions of 55 billion in 2007 and 71 billion in 2008. The Petroleum Stabilization Fund got off to an auspicious start as the original savings target (40 percent of 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% 45% 0% 5% Hacienda classifies revenue in Mexico into four main streams: oil revenue, income from 1990 1992 1994 Federal debtinterests(right)%ofGDP government (left) and as 1996 1998 Ley de Presupuesto 2000 2002 2004 2006 Domestic Foreign mandated a balanced budget in which deficits are only Figure 2 10% 6% 7% 8% 9% 0% 1% 2% 3% 4% 5% 1990 1991 1992 1993 2 1994 Finally, Mexico has fundamentally 1995 . 1996 ingresos presupuestarios 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 in 4 oil boom. Federal taxes accounted for roughly 40 percent of budgetary income during the same period, approximately 7-10 percent of GDP. Figure 3 Budgetary income as % of GDP 30% 25% 20% Oil income 15% Parastatal Non-taxes 10% Taxes 5% 0% 0 2 4 8 0 2 4 6 6 9 0 9 9 9 9 0 0 0 9 0 9 9 9 9 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 Source: see Table 1’s footnote, series Ingresos no petroleros XAB22, Tributarios XAB2210, No tributarios XAB2230, Organismos y empresas XAB2240, and Ingresos Petroleros XAB21. Revenue from parastatal entities, such as the Social Security Institute (IMSS) and the electric utility (CFE), accounted for 15-25 percent of revenue, some 3-5 percent of GDP. Revenue from non-tax sources, such as government bonds and privatization proceeds, provided another 5-15 percent of budgetary revenue, some 1-3 percent of GDP. Taken together, non-oil government revenue oscillated between 13-18 percent of GDP from 1990 to 2007. As suggested by Figure 3 above, the revenue collection system has been characterized by considerable volatility both within and between categories, not Just from petroleum sales (see also Martinez-Vázquez 2001).3 The non-tax revenue category, for example, swelled to over 15 percent of revenue during the peak period of privatization (1991-1992), but has fallen to only 5 percent of revenue today. The reliance on oil and other non-tax revenue is not sustainable because PEMEX’s production and reserves are falling precipitously (Figure 4). Crude oil production peaked at 3.383 million of barrels per day (MDB) in 2004 and stood at in 2.685 3 The value of Mexican petroleum exports was $1.5 billion in January 2009, compared to monthly average of $3.6 billion in 2008.